The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (EEOS), also
known as the "Coleman Study," was commissioned by the United States
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1966 to assess the
availability of equal educational opportunities to children of
different race, color, religion, and national origin. This study was
conducted in response to provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and serves as an example of the use of a social survey as an
instrument of national policy-makin... (more info)

The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (EEOS), also
known as the "Coleman Study," was commissioned by the United States
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1966 to assess the
availability of equal educational opportunities to children of
different race, color, religion, and national origin. This study was
conducted in response to provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and serves as an example of the use of a social survey as an
instrument of national policy-making. The EEOS consists of test scores
and questionnaire responses obtained from first-, third-, sixth-,
ninth-, and twelfth-grade students, and questionnaire responses from
teachers and principals. These data were obtained from a national
sample of schools in the United States. Data on students include age,
gender, race and ethnic identity, socioeconomic background, attitudes
toward learning, education and career goals, and racial attitudes.
Scores on teacher-administered standardized academic tests are also
included. These scores reflect performance on tests assessing ability
and achievement in verbal skills, nonverbal associations, reading
comprehension, and mathematics. Data on teachers and principals
include academic discipline, assessment of verbal facility, salary,
education and teaching experience, and attitudes toward race.

To ensure confidentiality, certain identifying variables are not available in the public-use versions. Restricted-use versions containing these variables are available. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete an Agreement for the Use of Confidential Data, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research. Apply for access to these data through the ICPSR restricted data contract portal.

Dataset(s)

WARNING: This study is over 150MB in size and may take several minutes to download on a typical internet connection.

Universe:
Public schools in the United States and the District of
Columbia.

Data Types:
administrative records data,
medical records,
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

Questionnaire responses should be read as
alphabetic characters.

A comma-separated values (CSV) file (USOE
Codes) and associated codebook have been added to the restricted
portion of this collection. This CSV file provides a crosswalk between
the USOE school codes in the confidential version of this study and
Census geographic units.

Methodology

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Performed consistency checks.

Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:1995-06-05

Version History:

2007-04-27 A comma-separated values (CSV) file
(USOE Codes) and associated codebook have been added to the restricted
portion of this collection.

2006-01-18 Files CB6389AP.ALL.PDF and CB6839.ALL.PDF
were removed from any previous datasets and flagged as study-level
files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2000-08-04 Two additional documentation files have
been provided by NCES, a study report and a supplemental appendix,
which have been converted to Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

2000-03-21 Blanks at the end of the records in Part
7, Principal Data, have been removed, resulting in a record length of
300 characters. In addition, SAS data definition statements have been
produced to accompany this collection, along with a machine-readable
codebook and data collection instruments in one PDF file. Also, the
documentation now accurately reflects the number of variables in each
file.